Trees (poem)
Written in February 1913, it was first published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse that August and included in Kilmer's 1914 collection Trees and Other Poems.
[1][2][3] The poem, in twelve lines of rhyming couplets of iambic tetrameter verse, describes what Kilmer perceives as the inability of art created by humankind to replicate the beauty achieved by nature.
Kilmer's work is often disparaged by critics and dismissed by scholars as being too simple and overly sentimental, and that his style was far too traditional and even archaic.
[5] "Trees" is frequently included in poetry anthologies and has been set to music several times—including a popular rendition by Oscar Rasbach, performed by singers Nelson Eddy, Robert Merrill, and Paul Robeson.
"Trees" was written in an upstairs bedroom at the family's home in Mahwah, New Jersey, that "looked out down a hill, on our well-wooded lawn".
[8]: p.28 According to Kilmer's oldest son, Kenton, "Trees" was written on February 2, 1913, when the family resided in Mahwah, New Jersey, in the northwestern corner of Bergen County.
The house stood in the middle of a forest and what lawn it possessed was obtained only after Kilmer had spent months of weekend toil in chopping down trees, pulling up stumps, and splitting logs.
[4][21][22] Rutgers-Newark English professor and poet Rachel Hadas described the poem as being "rather slight" although it "is free of irony and self consciousness, except that little reference to fools like me at the end, which I find kind of charming".
[23] Scholar Mark Royden Winchell points out that Kilmer's depiction of the tree indicates the possibility that he had several different people in mind because of the variety of anthropomorphic descriptions.
[22] In the second stanza, the tree is a sucking babe drawing nourishment from Mother Earth; in the third it is a supplicant reaching its leafy arms to the sky in prayer ...
In the fourth stanza, the tree is a girl with jewels (a nest of robins) in her hair; and in the fifth, it is a chaste woman living alone with nature and with God.
"Trees" began appearing in anthologies shortly after Kilmer's 1918 death, the first inclusion being Louis Untermeyer's Modern American Poetry (1919).
[30] Considering this sentiment, the enduring popularity of "Trees" is evinced by its association with annual Arbor Day observances and the planting of memorial trees as well as the several parks named in honor of Kilmer, including the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness and Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest tracts within the Nantahala National Forest in Graham County, North Carolina.
[34] Poet Conrad Aiken, a contemporary of Kilmer, lambasted his work as being unoriginal—merely "imitative with a sentimental bias" and "trotting out of the same faint passions, the same old heartbreaks and love songs, ghostly distillations of fragrances all too familiar".
[34] The entire corpus of Kilmer's work was produced between 1909 and 1918 when Romanticism and sentimental lyric poetry fell out of favor and Modernism took root—especially with the influence of the Lost Generation.
In the years after Kilmer's death, poetry went in drastically different directions, as is seen in the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and academic criticism grew with it to eschew the more sentimental and straightforward verse.
New Criticism proponents analyzed poetry on its aesthetic formulae and excluded reader's response, the author's intention, historical and cultural contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis.
[22] Due to the enduring popular appeal of "Trees", several local communities and organizations across the United States have staked their claim to the genesis of the poem.
[39][40] In New Brunswick, New Jersey, Kilmer's hometown, the claim involved a large white oak on the Cook College campus (now the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences), at Rutgers University.
"[16][18] Currently, saplings from acorns of the historic tree are being grown at the site, throughout the Middlesex County and central New Jersey, as well as in major arboretums around the United States.
[41][42] Because of Kilmer's close identification with Roman Catholicism and his correspondence with many priests and theologians, a tree located near a grotto dedicated to the Virgin Mary at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, has been asserted as the inspiration for the poem.
[17] In his 1997 book of essays entitled The Geography of the Imagination, American writer Guy Davenport suggests a different inspiration for Kilmer's poem.
But Kilmer had been reading about trees in another context[,] the movement to stop child labor and set up nursery schools in slums. ...
Margaret McMillan ... had the happy idea that a breath of fresh air and an intimate acquaintance with grass and trees were worth all the pencils and desks in the whole school system. ...
[47] This setting had been performed and recorded frequently in twentieth century, including Ernestine Schumann-Heink,[48] John Charles Thomas,[49] Nelson Eddy,[50] Robert Merrill,[51] Perry Como,[52] and Paul Robeson.
Rasbach's setting has also been lampooned, most notably in the Our Gang short film Arbor Day (1936), directed by Fred C. Newmeyer, in which Alfalfa (played by Carl Switzer), sings the song in a whiny, strained voice after a "woodsman, spare that tree" dialogue with Spanky (George McFarland).
[57][58] In his album Caught in the Act, Victor Borge, when playing requests, responds to a member of the audience: "Sorry I don't know that 'Doggie in the Window'.
[60] Because of the varied reception to Kilmer's poem and its simple rhyme and meter, it has been the model for several parodies written by humorists and poets alike.
While keeping with Kilmer's iambic tetrameter rhythm and its couplet rhyme scheme, and references to the original poem's thematic material, such parodies are often immediately recognizable, as is seen in "Song of the Open Road" written by poet and humorist Ogden Nash: "I think that I shall never see / A billboard lovely as a tree.
In the scene, villain Lex Luthor (played by Gene Hackman) and others enter Superman's Fortress of Solitude and comes across a video of an elder (John Hollis) from planet Krypton reciting "Trees" as an example of "poetry from Earth literature".[n.
